“This one is a destroyer. She will cause you to lose something very dear,” she said.
She was a mean, muscle-bound woman with a bent nose and black lipstick. She had the number 2 inked on her forehead.
I got a flash, then, from that place with the cages and the dead men, the place where they tried to study us. There were other people there, people like me, all locked up, and the dead men forced us to do things…. When I thought it was all over, a small woman appeared to me and told me something …something important. She showed me how to take control of a woman I’d never met; this woman with the mean face and the broken tooth. I brought her down there to me, and she saved my life.
“What will she make me lose? Why?”
“Your chance of successfully navigating this relationship is ten percent.”
“Lose what? What does she have against me?”
Another boom went off overhead, making the light fixtures sway and shadows play over the walls.
“Goddamn it. What is that noise?” I asked.
“Some people are more susceptible than others,” she said, ignoring me. She was still pointing at the woman.
“I know.”
When I looked closer at the muscle-bound figure, I saw her left hand was a pale gray, just like Nico’s arm. It triggered a flash of memory.
“She was there that night. I’ve seen her here before too,” I said to myself. A lot of what happened two years ago, I never really got clear on. The shakes were hitting me really bad by then, and everything was happening at once. I remembered a woman peeking through a hole from the cell next to mine. I remembered being hooked up to a bunch of electrodes, and then ending up in the green room….
“I called her,” I said, remembering. “I could sense her, and I called her, and she came.”
I remembered her shooting the lock to my cage and pulling me out.
“She rescued me.”
The dead woman nodded. “She may save your life a second time.”
“What about the middle spot?” I asked, but as soon as I said it, it came back to me. We’d had this conversation before.
“The middle spot is where—”
“You stand,” I said.
“We will meet two more times, before this is all over,” she said. “Your chances of successful navigation are, respectively, one hundred and zero percent.”
“Can those be changed?” I asked her. “If I can pass or fail, can the percents be changed? Can I change them?”
She wasn’t listening, though. She moved away, back toward the table, and flipped the switch back down. The lights over Nico and the other one went dark.
“You said I die in a tower. Can that be changed?”
“You die in a tall tower.”
With the lights out, I saw something flickering through the glass window in the room’s door. I got on my toes and looked out into a dimly lit hallway, where a bunch of people were sitting, leaning against the walls. They were all looking at the floor, their clothes and skin burned black. Orange and red spots glowed under the ash on their coats and boots. One, a woman, looked up, her face covered in soot. Her skin was cracked and raw. She mouthed something, but I couldn’t hear her.
“What do you want from me?” I asked the dead woman. Three men in uniform stepped into view down the hall and started tromping past them, toward the door, dragging a scrawny, dirty man in handcuffs between them.
“It’s too late for us,” the dead woman said, “but not for you.”
I turned, forgetting about the people in the hallway.
“What?”
“He still needs you. He will call to you again,” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘It’s too late for us’?” I asked.
“Should he fail, it will fall to you.”
“Wait!”
The metal door opened, and dust swirled in from the hallway. The uniformed men shoved the one in handcuffs toward the far wall where the three lights were.
“This is a mistake …” I heard him whisper.
Behind them, I caught a glimpse of a woman, a skinny woman about my height, with her hair in a bun, but she was in shadow.
“Who are—”
She turned her head to look back over her shoulder, and when she did, I could just make out some kind of tattoo that circled her scrawny neck.There was a ring-shaped scar there, where her jugular stuck out. Against the dim light behind her, her profile had a big, beaklike nose….
I woke with a start and my eyes opened. The green room and everyone in it were gone. Something was beeping.
“Damn it,” I whispered.
I was on the monorail, leaning against the window. The car was packed, and there were bodies all around me, damp from the rain and murmuring on cell phones or getting work in during the commute. A fat man in an overcoat formed a barrier to my left, leaving me in my own little world as I watched rain streak across the plastic and the city sprawl by outside. In the distance, the CMC Tower rose like a giant needle out of the fog.
The beeping sound came again, and I realized it was my phone reminding me to take my medication. The fat man glanced at me as I fished out my cell and shut off the alarm.
Mornings were when I still got the strongest urge. I thought it would be at night, but it wasn’t. It was when I first woke up, then for the rest of the morning. I held my hand out of view of the guy next to me and watched it for a minute. The fingers shook, just a little, not like before. I still missed it, though. I kept waiting for the day to come when I stopped missing it, but it never seemed to come.
I reached into my coat pocket and found one of the pill tabs. I pushed the chewable tablet through the foil and into my palm, and then popped it in my mouth. They were minty, but had a real bitter aftertaste. When I swallowed, it left a medicine taste on my tongue. That was one. I was supposed to take them three times a day.
The medication helped, that was for sure. Nico got me on a program, which I pretty much agreed to try only because he said I couldn’t come back to the FBI until I did. I didn’t think it would work, but whatever was in the tablets, it took the edge right off. When I woke up in the morning, I didn’t feel sick until I could get a drink. My hands stopped shaking so much, and I could go longer and longer without needing one. I still wanted it, but that sick feeling, and all the shaking and sweating and heart pounding, stopped. I hadn’t thrown up in almost six months.
I snorted. There was something to be proud of; a whole six months without ending up facedown in the toilet. In return, all I had to put up with was no appetite and hideous cramps.
The city is going to burn.
I hadn’t had that particular vision in a while, and I didn’t miss it. In general, the visions hadn’t been nearly as vivid since I stopped drinking, so there was that too in the plus column.
The problem was that the chemicals took only the physical edge off. They couldn’t change the fact that being sober was horrible.
My phone vibrated in my hand—a text from Karen, my downstairs neighbor. I opened the chat portal and read her message:
Missed you this morning.
I typed back a response: Sorry, had to run. Work needed me early.
That was partly true. I was supposed to meet Nico and he did have something he wanted me to do, but I didn’t even know what that was yet. I could have stopped by, but I’d kind of been avoiding her in the morning because I knew Ted was back. Her eyes had that look they got whenever her on-again, off-again asshole boyfriend was back on again. She didn’t want to say it because she knew I’d be pissed, and she was right.
Want to meet for lunch? She asked.
Sure.
We made a point of getting together to do that at least once a week, but that had tapered off a little too. Ted didn’t like me, and so he didn’t like her hanging around with me.